


Yeah, and people in hell want ice water

by keysmash



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Related, Hell, Multi, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-10
Updated: 2010-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-06 03:03:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keysmash/pseuds/keysmash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alistair said, "You will do it, Dean," said Castiel. Spoilers up to 415.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yeah, and people in hell want ice water

**Author's Note:**

> If you read your Bible, you'll see that it was pretty traditional for these prophets to go out into the wilderness from time to time—Old Testament Magical Mystery Tours. The timespan given for these jaunts was usually forty days and forty nights, a Hebraic idiom that means "no one knows exactly how long he was gone, but it was quite a while."   
> \- _The Stand_, Stephen King.
> 
> You can shoot us all you want but you can't kill us.  
> \- Dean, Death Takes a Vacation.

Alistair didn't appear the first time until Dean screamed himself hoarse. He kept him suspended, hooks pulling incrementally further in their various directions, and smiled slow and wide while he popped Dean's hell cherry.

After he carved away most of Dean's flesh and dropped the chunks further down the pit, Alistair leaned in close. His words burned hot over Dean's damp cheek.

"This can stop now," he said, "if you'll just..."

He turned Dean's head to the left, until Dean saw another figure, hanging below him.

"Just take care of that one for me," Alistair finished.

Dean's bottom jaw was gone, and the tendons between ear and collarbone were cut, but he could still control his eyelids. He closed his eyes.

_Stick it up your ass_, he thought, into his body's blood-lit darkness.

Alistair chuckled. "You'll come around eventually," he said, and snapped his fingers.

Everything turned white. Dean stayed in empty nothingness, without any way to know whether time passed, or if it existed at all, before he returned to a physical body, whole and healed. He lay restrained, flat on his back, on some smooth surface that seemed to stretch infinitely, everywhere. Alistair stood over him again, with both hands hidden.

"You'll do it," Alistair promised, and flashed his eyes white. "It's the only way out, and I have all the time I need to get you there."

.

"His father did it," Alistair said into Dean's ear. He tightened his arms around Dean for just a moment, then withdrew, trailing his hands over Dean's shoulders. Dean stared at the soul, embodied as a ten-year-old, gagged and strapped to a table.

"Sold his son's soul to save his own life," Alistair said. He wrapped one arm around Dean's waist from behind and offered him a knife with the other. The handle felt wonderfully solid in Dean's grip, and he ran his thumb over the cool base of the blade even while he shook his head. The boy stared at him with wide, wet eyes.

"Some parents, right?" Alistair laughed, low, then nuzzled against Dean's cheek. Dean didn't bother pulling away.

"I can't," he started, and Alistair immediately nodded.

"I know. It's always trickier when you're both virgins." He slid his hand slowly down Dean's arms and started peeling his fingers from the knife. "You'll need to get back on yourself, of course."

Dean pulled his eyes off the boy and found an empty table, larger, had appeared at his side.

"No," he said quickly, and clenched down on the handle. "No."

.

Alistair only gave him children: kids who'd sold themselves for their parents, kids who hadn't known what they'd traded, kids who'd been offered up on someone else's behalf.

The first time Dean finished one without crying at all, Alistair brought him a mirror.

"Your eyes," he said, and Dean's gaze shone black before slipping back to green. "You're turning faster than I'd hoped."

Dean looked away. The mirror disappeared from between his fingers.

"But this can stop, too," Alistair continued. The next soul, a teenaged boy who didn't even open his eyes as he waited, materialized on Dean's rack. "You can be at peace," his voice slid mockingly over the words, "and someone else can take your place."

"Who," Dean said, because an expectation was as good as an order, here.

Alistair appeared in front of Dean, and when he smiled, his features melted into Sam's face. Dean drank it in, the moles and the dimples and the stupid hair, even after Sam's grin fell into a leer and gold splashed across his eyes. He stared as long as Alistair let him, hoarding up Sam as the last good thing he'd ever have.

"It's where he's headed anyway," Alistair said, suddenly wearing his own face again. "You may as well get something out of it."

"Stick it up your _ass_." Dean turned back to the kid. "I wanna start with the sandpaper."

.

"Stop him yourself, Dean," Castiel repeated, leaning into Dean's space with that same bland expression. Dean sneered and looked away, but Castiel didn't leave.

"It's not his fault," Dean said, to the floor. "And you know he means well."

Castiel stayed silent long enough that Dean glanced up to see if he'd fucked off yet. He just stood there, though, eyebrows slightly raised.

"Or we will find someone to do it for you. I won't ask you again, Dean," Castiel said, and then his eyes flicked to the window. Dean looked over as well: nothing there. When he turned back, the room was empty.

.

Dean watched Sam check in through the driver's window for a moment, studying the tilt of his head as he spoke to the clerk, then turned away to dig carefully through the back seat. Bobby's wound in his shoulder ached, but Dean came up with a bottle of Coke, half empty and flat, and a few sticks of beef jerky. He pulled open a strip of meat as he turned back around. Castiel now sat in the passenger seat with his hands in his lap, watching Dean.

"Jesus christ," Dean said. He ripped off a hunk of jerky and spoke with his mouth full. "Any chance of you calling ahead for these little appointments?"

"Perhaps you see how bad it is, now," Castiel said. He nodded slowly to the front desk. Dean didn't look away. "Whatever it takes, Dean."

Dean raised his eyebrows. "Whatever? You mean that?"

"You'll know the best course," Castiel said.

Inside, Dean bent Sam over the sink and fucked him hard, with their jeans puddled around their ankles and Dean's arm tight around Sam's neck again.

The position sucked -- Sam couldn't spread his legs far enough without kicking off his pants, and Dean surged onto his toes with every thrust to make up the height difference. Sam moaned high and breathy under Dean's grip, taking it on two fingers and the motel's greasy lotion, and he wouldn't meet Dean's gaze in the mirror. Dean dug his free hand into Sam's tattoo and fucked hard enough that Sam clung to the counter instead of touching himself.

Dean pressed his face to the back of Sam's neck when he came. Sam's shirt, wrinkled under Dean's nose, smelled of sweat and old detergent, and his breath came quickly beneath Dean's chest.

"Sammy," he tried, and forced himself to gentle his arms around his brother.

"Get off me," Sam said instead, and shrugged hard, bucking against Dean. Dean grimaced and yanked out, then winced. He wiped off and tucked himself away. Dean stood in the doorway while Sam kept hunching into himself over the sink, finally slapping one hand back and forth over his cock. Sam wouldn't look at him while he worked, or as he brushed roughly past Dean on his way to bed, once he finished.

Sam's neck and shoulders bloomed with bruises the next day. Neither mentioned it.

.

Dean woke to a dark room, with Sam's voice coming low and steady from the other bed.

"Yeah," he said, then waited. "No. Maybe after this job." Another pause. "I have been."

Dean glanced over. He couldn't see the lights on Sam's phone, so the conversation had been going on long enough for the phone to start conserving its power. Sam kept speaking in carefully contextless phrases -- I left you a message, I already told you that, I am -- for a few minutes longer, before Dean rolled his eyes and climbed out of bed.

He swept the flask and the knife both from under his pillow and took them outside, onto their room's tiny balcony. The cars in the parking lot one floor below shone in the streetlights. Castiel sat on a bench on the other side of the road. The hem of his coat rippled slightly in the breeze. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and nodded up at Dean. A truck rattled down the road, and Castiel was gone when the trailer passed the bench. Dean rolled his eyes, hard, and settled in against the railing.

He'd knocked back four swigs before Sam slid the door open and joined him.

"That was," Sam started, but Dean snorted and shook his head.

"I told you to stop treating me like an idiot," he said. "You really think I'll believe you're using your phone sex voice on Bobby or whoever else at ass o'clock at night?"

Sam sighed heavily and propped his arms on the rail, mirroring Dean's position. "What do you want me to say? I was talking to Ruby, is that what you want to hear?"

"Uh, no?" Dean shot back. "I don't give a fuck if she's helped us a few times. I don't like working with a fucking _demon_ and you know it."

Sam shook his head and kept staring over the cars. "You ever think that maybe I lie to you because you flip your shit whenever I tell the truth?"

Dean snorted a laugh and pulled another drink instead of answering. This mouthful burned in a way his earlier shots hadn't, and Dean stayed quiet while heat spread down his chest. The liquor hit his belly before he trusted himself to speak without coughing.

"You should stop," he said simply. Sam heaved another sigh and didn't look up until Dean bumped their elbows together. Sam's jaw was set but his eyes shone in the light. Dean held out the flask silently, and they both looked away when Sam's fingers closed on the metal.

"Stop, Sam," Dean repeated, and closed his eyes.


End file.
